FREEDOM EB White

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FREEDOM
E. B. White
E.B. White (1899-1985) wrote this essay and published it in Harper's magazine in July 1940. It seemed
appropriate to put his essay up in reaction to some of the events and rhetoric of the current time.
For Homework: Print out this article and ircle all the concrete nouns in this essay and list them on a
separate sheet of paper. Write a paragraph on what seems to you the strangest object for an essay on
freedom? How do these unlikely concrete objects (windowsill, for example) keep the reader’s mind
engaged in the abstract idea of freedom?
I have often noticed on my trips up to the city that people have recut their clothes to follow the fashion.
On my last trip, however, it seemed to me that people had remodeled their ideas too--taken in their
convictions a little at the waist, shortened the sleeves of their resolve, and fitted themselves out in a
new intellectual ensemble copied from a smart design out of the very latest page of history. It seemed
to me they had strung along with Paris a little too long.
I confess to a disturbed stomach. I feel sick when I find anyone adjusting his mind to the new tyranny
which is succeeding abroad. Because of its fundamental strictures, fascism does not seem to me to
admit of any compromise or any rationalization, and I resent the patronizing air of persons who find in
my plain belief in freedom a sign of immaturity. If it is boyish to believe that a human being should live
free, then I'll gladly arrest my development and let the rest of the world grow up.
I shall report some of the strange remarks I heard in New York. One man told me that he thought
perhaps the Nazi ideal was a sounder ideal than our constitutional system "because have you ever
noticed what fine alert young faces the young German soldiers have in the newsreel?" He added, "Or
American youngsters spend all their time at the movies--they're a mess." That was his summation of the
case, his interpretation of the new Europe. Such a remark leaves me pale and shaken. If it represents the
peak of our intelligence, then the steady march of despotism will not receive any considerable setback
at our shores.
Another man informed me that our democratic notion of popular government was decadent and not
worth bothering about--"because England is really rotten and the industrial towns there are a disgrace."
That was the only reason he gave for the hopelessness of democracy; and he seemed mightily pleased
with himself, as though he were more familiar than most with the anatomy of decadence, and had
detected subtler aspects of the situation than were discernible to the rest of us.
Another man assured me that anyone who took any kind of government seriously was a gullible fool.
You could be sure, he said, that there is nothing but corruption "because of the way Clemenceau acted
at Versailles." He said it didn't make any difference really about this war. It was just another war. Having
relieved himself of this majestic bit of reasoning, he subsided.
Another individual, discovering signs of zeal creeping into my blood, berated me for having lost my
detachment, my pure skeptical point of view. He announced that he wasn't going to be swept away by
all this nonsense, but would prefer to remain in the role of innocent bystander, which he said was the
duty of any intelligent person. (I noticed, that he phoned later to qualify his remark, as though he had
lost some of his innocence in the cab on the way home.)
Those are just a few samples of the sort of talk that seemed to be going round--talk which was full of
defeatism and disillusion and sometimes of a too studied innocence. Men are not merely annihilating
themselves at a great rate these days, but they are telling one another enormous lies, grandiose fibs.
Such remarks as I heard are fearfully disturbing in their cumulative effect. They are more destructive
than dive bombers and mine fields, for they challenge not merely one's immediate position but one's
main defenses. They seemed to me to issue either from persons who could never have really come to
grips with freedom so as to understand her, or from renegades. Where I expected to find indignation, I
found paralysis, or a sort of dim acquiescence, as in a child who is duly swallowing a distasteful pill. I was
advised of the growing anti-Jewish sentiment by a man who seemed to be watching the phenomenon of
intolerance not through tears of shame but with a clear intellectual gaze, as through a well-ground lens.
The least a man can do at such a time is to declare himself and tell where he stands. I believe in freedom
with the same burning delight, the same faith, the same intense abandon which attended its birth on
this continent more than a century and a half ago. I am writing my declaration rapidly, much as though I
were shaving to catch a train. Events abroad give a man a feeling of being pressed for time. Actually I do
not believe I am pressed for time, and I apologize to the reader for a false impression that may be
created. I just want to tell, before I get slowed down, that I am in love with freedom and that it is an
affair of long standing and that it is a fine state to be in, and that I am deeply suspicious of people who
are beginning to adjust to fascism and dictators merely because they are succeeding in war. From such
adaptable natures a smell rises. I pinch my nose.
For as long as I can remember I have had a sense of living somewhat freely in a natural world. I don't
mean I enjoyed freedom of action, but my existence seemed to have the quality of free-ness. I traveled
with secret papers pertaining to a divine conspiracy. Intuitively I've always been aware of the vitally
important pact which a man has with himself, to be all things to himself, and to be identified with all
things, to stand self-reliant, taking advantage of his haphazard connection with a planet, riding his luck,
and following his bent with the tenacity of a hound. My first and greatest love affair was with this thing
we call freedom, this lady of infinite allure, this dangerous and beautiful and sublime being who restores
and supplies us all.
It began with the haunting intimation (which I presume every child receives) of his mystical inner life; of
God in man; of nature publishing herself through the "I" This elusive sensation is moving and
memorable. It comes early in life; a boy, we'll say, sitting on the front steps on a summer night, thinking
of nothing in particular, suddenly hearing as with a new perception and as though for the first time the
pulsing sound of crickets, overwhelmed with the novel sense of identification whith the natural
company of insects and grass and night, conscious of a faint answering cry to the universal perplexing
question: "What is 'I'?" Or a little girl, returning from the grave of a pet bird leaning with her elbows on
the window sill, inhaling the unfamiliar draught of death, suddenly seeing herself as part of the
complete story. Or to an older youth, encountering for the first time a great teacher who by some
chance word or mood awakens something and the youth beginning to breathe as an individual and
conscious of strength in his vitals. I think the sensation must develop in many men as a feeling of
identity with God--an eruption of the spirit caused by allergies and the sense of divine existence as
distinct from mere animal existence. This is the beginning of the affair with freedom.
But a man's free condition is of two parts: the instinctive free-ness he experiences as an animal dweller
on a planet, and the practical liberties he enjoys as a privileged member of human society. The latter is,
of the two, more generally understood, more widely admired, more violently challenged and discussed.
It is the practical and apparent side of freedom. The United States, almost alone today, offers the
liberties and the privileges and the tools of freedom. In this land the citizens are still invited to write
plays and books, to paint their pictures, to meet for discussion, to dissent as well as to agree, to mount
soapboxes in the public square, to enjoy education in all subjects without censorship, to hold court and
judge one another, to compose music, to talk politics with their neighbors without wondering whether
the secret police are listening, to exchange ideas as well as goods, to kid the government when it needs
kidding, and to read real news of real events instead of phony news manufactured by a paid agent of the
state. This is a fact and should give every person pause.
To be free, in a planetary sense, is to feel that you belong to earth. To be free, in a social sense, is to feel
at home in a democratic framework. In Adolph Hitler, although he is a freely flowering individual, we do
not detect either type of sensibility. From reading his book I gather that his feeling for earth is not a
sense of communion but a driving urge to prevail. His feeling for men is not that they co-exist, but that
they are capable of being arranged and standardized by a superior intellect--that their existence
suggests not a fulfillment of their personalities but a submersion of their personalities in the common
racial destiny. His very great absorption in the destiny of the German people somehow loses some of its
effect when you discover, from his writings, in what vast contempt he holds all people. "I learned," he
wrote, "...to gain an insight into the unbelievably primitive opinions and arguments of the people." To
him the ordinary man is a primitive, capable only of being used and led. He speaks continually of people
as sheep, halfwits, and impudent fools--the same people to whom he promises the ultimate in prizes.
Here in America, where our society is based on belief in the individual, not contempt for him, the free
principle of life has a chance of surviving. I believe that it must and will survive. To understand freedom
is an accomplishment which all men may acquire who set their minds in that direction; and to love
freedom is a tendency which many Americans are born with. To live in the same room with freedom, or
in the same hemisphere, is still a profoundly shaking experience for me.
One of the earliest truths (and to him most valuable) that the author of Mein Kampf discovered was that
it is not the written word, but the spoken word, which in heated moments moves great masses of
people to noble or ignoble action. The written word, unlike the spoken word, is something which every
person examines privately and judges calmly by his own intellectual standards, not by what the man
standing next to him thinks. "I know," wrote Hitler, "that one is able to win people far more by the
spoken than by the written word...." Later he adds contemptuously: "For let it be said to all knights of
the pen and to all the political dandies, especially of today: the greatest changes in this world have
never been brought about by a goose quill! No, the pen has always been reserved to motivate these
changes theoretically."
Luckily I am not out to change the world--that's being done for me, and at a great clip. But I know that
the free spirit of man is persistent in nature; it recurs, and has never successfully been wiped out, by fire
or flood. I set down the above remarks merely (in the words of Mr. Hitler) to motivate that spirit,
theoretically. Being myself a knight of the goose quill, I am under no misapprehension about "winning
people"; but I am inordinately proud these days of the quill, for it has shown itself, historically, to be the
hypodermic which inoculates men and keeps the germ of freedom always in circulation, so that there
are individuals in every time in every land who are the carriers, the Typhoid Marys, capable of infecting
others by mere contact and example. These persons are feared by every tyrant--who shows his fear by
burning the books and destroying the individuals. A writer goes about his task today with the extra
satisfaction which comes from knowing that he will be the first to have his head lopped off--even before
the political dandies. In my own case this is a double satisfaction, for if freedom were denied me by
force of earthly circumstance, I am the same as dead and would infinitely prefer to go into fascism
without my head than with it, having no use for it any more and not wishing to be saddled with so heavy
an encumbrance.